Seolbong Park

We skip the next day, ignoring that I am also writing and sending on a next day, to Seolbong Park. Turns out the One World Music Festival was happening there. Why don’t people tell me these things in advance? I could have seen interesting music for the whole week already.

This is a festival that seems to be happening every year here in Icheon. They invite groups from all over the world to come and perform. I noticed that there is a Korean group every day, but that they are only at the very end. Don’t you find it sad that you have to try and trick people in to enjoying music from other countries? Isn’t the idea here for people to come and see because they want to? Why do they only have to come to see the Korean performers?

Maybe I need to get my information sites up and running and get a diary to plan things in advance.

When I left then house it really didn’t seem like the weather would be bad, s little cold, maybe, but that would be it, so I decided to walk to the park I also didn’t take an umbrella. As luck would have it the weather changed to produce this really annoying spraying rain. Not enough to really make you wet, but enough to make you cold and to have the musicians worry about their instruments. The whole show was in pause mode for more than an hour.

I did manage to see a few bands and take a few interesting pictures of children running around, but by 8pm I had enough of the weather and headed home. Luckily they were selling cheap rain coat inside the grounds. I got one just before I went out. I must have looked like a large condom walking down the street. At least if I was still in the grounds then I would have been with all the other condoms.

A useful result of the Festival was that I met a whole bunch of new people. I knew some of the teachers before but here they were with others I didn’t know yet. I’m thinking of trying to find them on Facebook

Honestly, when I look at what I just wrote here then it seems like it must have been the most boring day in my life. I didn’t even manage to write in such a way as to make it seem more interesting. This piece of writing is even worse than what I normally do, er?

Well, such is live and you will get some good posts and some bad posts.

Hope you all enjoy the rest of your week
Until next week

Go well

*Please note that the statements in this Blog are not intended to make anyone look bad. I do not look down on Koreans. I'm merely describing how amusing I sometimes find people and I am mostly describing it to other westerners. Feel free to come to South Africa and tell the world how crazy we are because heaven knows, we are.

Cultures all around.

For the most part, last week was just another week. Holidays that I don’t care much about in the middle of nowhere, class schedule that changes without e knowing and playing online games (Where I kicked a bit of arse). The fun stuff happened over the weekend.

Saturday saw me attending the Baekseong Cultural Festival in Anseong. It is an annual week long festival that displays mostly Korean Culture with a bit of spice from other countries. Koreans are just like peoples of the world. If you don’t shove other cultures in their faces then they will never make the effort to learn about it and they will still believe they are the best. This gives them a chance see that everywhere has something good to offer. Please don’t think I mean all Koreans are like this because they are most certainly now. Lots of them read up on the world and some tries their best to travel so that they can learn more.

Enough about them and back to me. It is, after all, what the Blog is about, isn’t it? This festival was an opportunity for me to learn more both traditional and modern Korean Culture. You would be surprised how much you learn here about things that most people will not be able to tell you about. Famous things that Korean know exist, but never saw before themselves. Think of it like South Africans who say “Cape Town is one of the most beautiful cities in the world”, but they have never been there because they go to Margate every year.

The two things that I found most interesting was the Rope Dancing and the activity display for rice harvesting.

With the Eurum (Rope Dancing) you have one guy that walks on a tight rope suspended in the air with large wooden poles. I have to say that the actual rope walking only happens very occasionally. What does happen more frequently is the banter between him and one of his troops members in the band. Even tough I couldn’t understand the banter, I still thought it was great fun. Most of the performance is about the banter and not the rope dancing. If this seems weird then think of it this way. You only need few minutes to run across, jump up and down and get off. That might be interesting in itself, but it is not most certainly not entertainment.

The group that does this is called Namsadang. The group was supposedly started in the Joseon period and have been around ever since. Maybe, maybe not. The name of the festival is actually names after a legendary leader of the group.

Part of the group’s activities include Pungmulnori (Hats. With Twirling Tassel Dancing) and Beona nori (Leather Plate Twirling). Think of them as the Circus of old Korea. You can see this often in Insadong, although I can’t be sure how often now that it is getting colder.

The Rice harvesting is something that we don’t really get to see in South Africa and I suspect that even if we do harvest rice, then it is done with some kind of automated system. Here, however, you can still find people who use a divider akin to comb, spinning wheel and a few other things that I don’t know how to describe the this time, to separate the rice from the stems ( I left my camera at home and that is partly how I remember what to write about)

Other areas showed you how to twirl plates, paint masks and anything you can think of that is Korean Culture and can be enjoyed.

Food wise there were stalls where you could buy street food, like the chicken pieces on a stick, dakpokki and other things I don’t know the names of, au usual. Ass to this the normal fair section where you give away all your money for a chance to win something useless, bridges over the shallow river and plays that I have no idea what it as about.

I suppose I should add in that I went with 2 South Africans and an America. Getting there with them was an adventure all on its own, but since I am not writing a novel here, I will not bore you with the details of that.

In the next post I will give a quick run down of the Music Festival that was happening the same weekend in Icheon

*Please note that the statements in this Blog are not intended to make anyone look bad. I do not look down on Koreans. I'm merely describing how amusing I sometimes find people and I am mostly describing it to other westerners. Feel free to come to South Africa and tell the world how crazy we are because heaven knows, we are.

Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix

...as told my an 12 year old Korean

During the recent school vacation I had to do a vacation school for one week. One of the things I tried was to show a film or two and have them write a report, in English, about it. The trick was that I turned off the subtitles so that they will be forced to listen and get used to hearing English. Here follows one of the results.

Harry Potter

The nautical mile gun the true profit which it shakes off it did and it was kind and if the if country the nautical mile gun it will sprout and when like being placed in crisis it will do how???

If probably the country the nautical mile gun sprouts and like that le j i of abso luteness it appears not to being able it eats a cowardice in advance and it escapes, or, the situation the busy thing it avoids, it is same it is born but the nautical mile gun it will sprout and it will Follow the example and like that crisis will approach and must have the wisdom it will be able to evacuate that crisis must dispose all.

Up to now I have not been able to figure out what a Nautical Mile Gun is

Just for fun I include the interesting translation of Transformers. It has to do with the way the word is written in Korean. They rarely actually read the English name if they can see a Korean spelling

The Korean looks like this: 트런스포머
The closest direct translation will be: Tu-lan-su-po-ma (note the sudden singular).

On the back of the page describing Harry Potter she just started with Transformers when I took pity on her, but this was how she wrote the name…

thu Lance former

*Please note that the statements in this Blog are not intended to make anyone look bad. I do not look down on Koreans. I'm merely describing how amusing I sometimes find people and I am mostly describing it to other westerners. Feel free to come to South Africa and tell the world how crazy we are because heaven knows, we are.